"Why not? Look at the little men they are."
"And then perhaps a still bigger house?"
"You're not fair to me."
He pulled up the bearskin over his knees.
"Marjorie!" he said. "You see——We aren't going to do any of those things at all.... No!..."
"I can't go on with my researches," he explained. "That's what you don't understand. I'm not able to get back to work. I shall never do any good research again. That's the real trouble, Marjorie, and it makes all the difference. As for politics——I can't touch politics. I despise politics. I think this empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it, silly, silly beyond words; temporary, accidental, foolish, a mere stop-gap—like a gipsey's roundabout in a place where one will presently build a house.... You don't help make the house by riding on the roundabout.... There's no clear knowledge—no clear purpose.... Only research matters—and expression perhaps—I suppose expression is a sort of research—until we get that—that sufficient knowledge. And you see, I can't take up my work again. I've lost something...."
She waited.
"I've got into this stupid struggle for winning money," he went on, "and I feel like a woman must feel who's made a success of prostitution. I've been prostituted. I feel like some one fallen and diseased.... Business and prostitution; they're the same thing. All business is a sort of prostitution, all prostitution is a sort of business. Why should one sell one's brains any more than one sells one's body?... It's so easy to succeed if one has good brains and cares to do it, and doesn't let one's attention or imagination wander—and it's so degrading. Hopelessly degrading.... I'm sick of this life, Marjorie. I don't want to buy things. I'm sick of buying. I'm at an end. I'm clean at an end. It's exactly as though suddenly in walking through a great house one came on a passage that ended abruptly in a door, which opened—on nothing! Nothing!"
"This is a mood," she whispered to his pause.
"It isn't a mood, it's a fact.... I've got nothing ahead, and I don't know how to get back. My life's no good to me any more. I've spent myself."